“We can do this,” he said. “She would want us to.”
She pulled away to look at him.
“Together,” he said. From deep in his own grief he recognized the despair that would haunt him for years, and made the declaration to keep the decay he felt growing inside him from tingeing someone so young. He would bear the guilt. It was his alone to bear.
He would speak to his father. If nothing else, perhaps Luluwa might gain a new brother, and he a little sister. Small comforts, but tied together in the knowledge of the one that had gone, a bond that might see them through what was to come in the light of what they had lost.
Chapter One
Maghreb adhan sounds out from the neighborhood mosques as the last rays of sunlight creep toward the horizon, turning day into dusk. In his mind’s eye Abdulla sees the men in the family washing their hands and feet then lining up, kneeling, glancing to the right then the left, their voices united in reciting God’s praises. He had missed the call to prayer during his time in London. The warm familiarity of it had calmed him then, even more so during Ramadan, the season of fasting that has just begun.
But now he has been home for three years, a widower for almost the same amount of time. He is nearly three days into the holiest month of the year and prayer is the farthest thing from his mind, though he goes through the motions when the family convenes. He does his best to dodge them even during this season of togetherness. The Thursday night ritual inspires nothing but a desire to avoid being in their midst. His heart has grown cold under the weight of their repeated condolences, which attempt to ease the hurt of Fatima’s abbreviated life. How could his unborn child be the will of God? And he won’t blaspheme publicly by telling his family that he isn’t sure this is a god he can keep worshiping. These are Abdulla’s darkest moments, just after he has been staring again at his dead baby’s sonogram, with its frayed edges, a bisecting line across the infant’s forehead. He has done this more or less nightly for three years. When he has finished, he completes the ritual by slipping the sonogram into its hiding place in the crevice between his BlackBerry and its leather case.
He checks his eyes in the mirror again, wishing there weren’t so many veins made visible from lack of sleep. Taking a deep breath, he pulls on his white embroidered gahfieh, a close-fitting skullcap. Next, a white ghutra, folded so that it hangs evenly on either side. The circular coiled black 'agal on top, and he flips the ends of the ghutra over the crown of his head so they hang down on his shoulders. He does all of this as though he were going to join his father and uncles in the majlis, though he knows he can’t bring himself to leave the bachelor quarters. Living in his boyhood room again is both comforting and numbing. It reminds him of his carefree life in the days before his brief marriage ended, but in doing so can’t help but remind him how the end came.
“Yalla, wagt akil al‘ashaa, ya Abdulla! Go eat dinner. They’re about to sit down,” Luluwa says, interrupting his thoughts and the well-trodden road they bend toward. She props herself in the doorway with childish abandon, the odd angles of youth still evident in her sharp features. She is twelve now, and mellowing underneath her characteristic gangliness are hints of the beautiful woman she will become. As much as she would like him to see her as such, he rejects the devotion he sees in her eyes. He knows the depth of his own selfishness, though to her he is the world.
The sight of his little cousin both eases and complicates the ache in his heart. She is, after all, Fatima’s sister. Yet from the moment his grandfather took her into his home in the shadow of her mother leaving, Luluwa’s childhood home has been full of painful memories of the sister she has lost and the parents who rejected her. She has been hanging around Abdulla’s house, and Abdulla, when she can find him. She is now, without question, his little sister, and because of this he accepts her nagging. He doesn’t mind. Abdulla couldn't help but love her, even if he often wishes she would leave him alone. Despite himself, he smiles at the sound of her heel tapping on the marble floor. He keeps his back to her, takes a deep breath, and continues arranging the edges of his ghutra, pulling the ‘agal forward slightly. Maybe she will get the hint and go.
If Fatima hadn’t married me she’d be alive, Abdulla thought for the millionth time. And Luluwa would still have her sister.
But instead of leaving him in monastic peace, Luluwa saunters in and jumps onto the bed, bouncing up and down on her knees. He can see her from the corner of his eye, which means if she looks closely she’ll be able to spot the telltale signs of his ever-persistent grief. She is wearing the same black leggings and t-shirt he saw her wear at least three days ago, but now she sports hot pink, silver-tipped stilettos.
“That t-shirt again?” he asks, hoping to distract with the opening volley.
“This is Alexander McQueen,” she retorts. “He designed Kate Middleton’s wedding dress.”
“He’s dead,” Abdulla says drily, withholding the fact that McQueen had hanged himself.
“His label then,” Luluwa waves. “Noor says he’s – McQueen – is amazing.”
Abdulla keeps adjusting his ghutra with his back to her, willing the tears to dry.
“Ammi Mohammed will send someone to come get you. You don’t want that.”
Even though she is young, she’s right. He doesn’t want his father in here.
“Is that why you’re here, O self-appointed messenger?”
She shakes her head while typing a message into her iPhone, silver but unadorned with crystals, unlike those of other girls her age.
“I came to warn you,” she says. “Noor says tonight the uncles are going to make, like, a big announcement. Like someone is getting engaged.”
Their eyes meet in the mirror, and for a second he sees someone else, older, plumper, asking how they would spend their weekend, through a screen of similar lashes. Then she giggles, and Fatima’s face recedes. It is just Luluwa, his dead wife’s teenage sister.
A pair of silver-toned cuff links completes his preparations. He’s ready. There is no avoiding it. Luluwa is right: he is running out of time. But in more ways than one. His time as a grieving widower has extended far beyond what’s considered “normal”. His father has grown tired of his requests to maintain a low profile. He really should make an appearance.
“Alright,” Abdulla says gruffly, trying to mask the raw edge in his voice. He tosses a baseball cap from the dresser at Luluwa, who deftly ducks it. “I’m going.”
Luluwa sits up, thrilled she has made a difference. She puts the cap on her head and gives him a thumbs-up. Even in his amusement Abdulla can’t help noticing the evil eye necklace, once his gift to Fatima, now belonging to Luluwa. The very top of it peeks out of her t-shirt, reminding him of happier times. Looking down, he notices her feet.
“What’s with the shoes?” he says, making a sour face.
Luluwa ignores the question, determined to keep him on track. “Yalla, they’re like, here,” she says, waving her arms around as though hordes of cousins were at the door. “Haven’t you heard anything I’m saying? They want to know which of our men is ready. In their roundabout way, of course.”
He reclaims his cap by pulling it off her head and parking it on his doorknob. Then he ruffles her hair until it hangs in her face. Again he notices the familiar glint of the only thing Fatima ever asked of him during their three-month marriage.
“The necklace doesn’t match either,” he says. But Luluwa ignores him, as she has the entire three years he’s tried to trick her into giving it up. Her fingers fly protectively to her neck as she tucks back her sister’s engagement present. As a special favor, she had asked him to part with it from Fatima’s personal effects. Now there is no way she is about to part with it herself.
“Look at your clothes,” Abdulla says, laughing. “Haven’t your cousins tamed the tomboy out of you yet? If you are going to be a girl, you should know what matches.”
“You can’t, like, imagine how bad it is,” Luluwa pouts. “Wallah, they’re so
uninteresting.”
“Like, please stop watching so much American television.”
But Abdulla knows what she means. Apparently their female cousins think marriage and bad TV are the best ways to domesticate a girl.
“And when the subject turns to boys, it’s as if you five are like, the only guys on the planet,” she continues.
“Five?” he protests. Abdulla does not want to be included in any list of single men, especially the eligible men in the family. Never has.
“Well, be honest. Do you fancy any of them, even one of them?” She flips onto her stomach as Abdulla pretends to pause and consider.
“Hind thinks she’s getting married, so they’ve all gone silly crazy. Even Noor –” Luluwa breaks off to draw her arms to her chest in a swoon.
Abdulla wags his head. “As far as I’m concerned, there’s nobody suitable in this house,” he says. “Father knows. Let him tell them that.”
“This time they brought the baby,” Luluwa is saying. “You know, Hassan’s boy. He’s become a real cutie.”
“I’m not getting married again,” he says, not hearing her. “Like, ever.”
He shuts the door before she can show him the baby photos – his latest third cousin – on her iPhone. He presses his forehead against it for a second; trying to gather enough strength to go forward instead of beating the usual retreat back inside his cave to lose himself in the embrace of sleep.
On the walk towards the majlis, he flexes his shoulders as though getting ready for his daily run. Once inside, he leaves his sandals in the pile with all the others before entering the room reserved for the men of the family and their guests. This weekend even the oldest men of his family have gathered. There are at least four generations seated, sprawled and standing across the blue gilt-edged furniture.
“Every day there’s something in the paper about it,” his Uncle Saoud is saying. “So many applications for men marrying outside our community.”
With a sinking feeling Abdulla sees his father and other uncle nod in agreement. This isn’t a new phenomenon, but marriage issues for locals is a subject Uncle Saoud doesn’t have the luxury of avoiding in his position as head of the Council on Marrying Foreigners.
“Settling your girls in a good home has never been harder,” Saoud says.
Abdulla mentally kicks himself for choosing this moment to enter. But there’s nothing to do but continue now that they’ve seen him.
“Al salaam alaikum,” Abdulla says. He begins greeting them, starting with a kiss on top of his grandfather Jassim’s head, with its wisps of grey hair escaping from under his ghutra, showing the respect and affection due from the oldest grandson. He greets his uncles and cousins with a handshake and the nose-to-nose bump reserved for closest family and friends.
“Are you in the fish market?” his father calls out from across the room, casting a cold eye on his eldest son’s attire and the Adam’s apple revealed by the opening in his thobe. Abdulla buttons the starched collar to his thobe without replying. The greetings end with a kiss on top of his father’s wiry black curls. Abdulla turns, hoping to get in about thirty minutes with his youngest brother at the PlayStation in the corner and make a swift getaway. But his father’s hands steer him instead into the opposite corner, where his uncles are drinking gahwa, Arabic coffee.
“You are overdue to make an announcement,” his father says quietly, in English.
“Yuba, let’s not talk about this now,” Abdulla replies in Arabic, as several of the youngest boys, his cousins – their parentage he can’t quite remember – jump from one chair to another. Luluwa was right: they are out for blood tonight.
“In my day you’d be serving the gahwa to your elders,” his grandfather Jassim booms, ending in a gut-wrenching cough that hushes conversation across the room. He dispatches one of the boys for Anita, the housemaid, to take the children back to the women, but not before he has ruffled their hair and slipped a few ten-riyal notes into the pockets of their thobes to show them he isn’t really angry.
“Grow up and work hard,” he rumbles at them. “If I still had my boat, I would take you out on the sea.”
“And I would go with you, Yaddi,” Abdulla’s youngest brother says, “all the way to India!”
Jassim smiles and pinches the boy’s cheek, then hides a grimace when the teen crushes him in a fierce embrace. The boys tumble out, leaving only the marriageable or married men behind.
Abdulla’s father breaks the silence. “Your grandfather grows tired of waiting,” he warns in a low growl that his five sons recognize as the rumble of an argument in the making. Surrender, they know, is the only option to bypass the coming storm of words.
But Abdulla is determined to maintain his marital resistance by sticking to a non-violent strategy of silence. Whatever his father says, he will swallow his anger along with mouthfuls of tea, knowing he is only doing what any Arab father would do for his eldest son: make him a husband and father, and therefore a man. Yet Abdulla has been through it once, and it didn’t end well for anyone, least of all the wife to whom he was supposed to be such a blessing.
If only he could, he would go back through time and space to London and become again the bachelor he was three years ago, a wandering student in the bricked arcades of Covent Garden, idling with the street entertainers. Back then his biggest worry was contemplating how many of Ben’s Cookies he could eat and how long he had to wait before going out for dinner at Mr. Chow’s.
“Ya waldi,” his Uncle Saoud says. “You know you are like my own son.” He is the first to speak now, just as he had been first to kick-start the previous engagement. Abdulla can barely see his lips in the curly strands of his beard. “What has happened is over. Forget all of it and start again. Afresh. New.”
Abdulla tries to keep from flinching as his father nods vigorous agreement. All the men in his family are suddenly behaving like female matchmakers. And this on top of his mother’s pointed mutterings whenever she lays eyes on him, as she oversees the gardener tending her jasmine plants when Abdulla walks out to his car in the morning, or late in the evening when he comes into the main house and she is watching Turkish soap operas dubbed into Arabic.
“Let’s speak of this tomorrow, insha’Allah,” Abdulla offers in an even tone. This line worked for the first few months after he’d returned from England. The family gave him wide latitude, so he kept using it, desperate to buy more time. Insha’Allah, God willing. Though as far as he was concerned, God had little to do with this or much of anything else important.
There is no mirth in his favorite uncle’s eyes tonight. Abdulla is momentarily overwhelmed by a memory of being in this position three years ago. Whether it is déjà vu or not Abdulla can’t tell. Three years earlier, a different Abdulla sat in this same room, in this same chair, brought like a misbehaving youth before his uncles so they could muscle him into doing his duty. Strategically his father had trapped him then, as they have done now, in the majlis, where the family hierarchy cannot be escaped by excuses of football matches and waiting dignitaries. Abdulla feels bullied. The whole wretched process is drawing him nearer to hating all of them, not least because of their utter lack of sensitivity about Fatima. He is torn between rage and nausea, his forehead beading in sweat as he tries to adjust his ghutra for distraction.
“I’m still considering women,” Abdulla says, clearing his throat. Perhaps a different tack is called for. He used to take his younger brother and cousins to Villaggio Mall so they could skulk around attractive girls. He hopes this counts. Anything, lies even, might replace the right here, right now, of a formal sitting room in Qatar, his father’s hand heavy on his shoulder, the eyes of his uncles and cousins peeling back the layers of his soul. But no, he is here, his father’s slight shove to the middle of his back directing Abdulla to sit in the armchair to the right of Saoud. Unable to avoid what is coming, Abdulla sits, pinching the bridge of his nose, waving away Narin, the family’s driver, who is coming towards him with a tray lad
en with more red tea. “Because marriage," Abdulla continues, “is part of being a Muslim man, I know that. And when the time comes… ” He falters, never a good liar.
The older men exchange glances.
“Aisha,” his father says, twisting the jade beads of a misbah between his right thumb and forefinger.
“Nouf,” Uncle Saoud cuts in.
“I don’t want a wife who will spend all my money on Gucci or Prada.”
“Allah knows it would take more than a few years for someone to do that,” his father grunts. “You don’t spend your money on anything else.”
“What about Amal?” pipes up Khalid, his thirteen-year-old cousin, thrusting himself into the game of planning the rest of Abdulla’s life.
“I told you boys to go and eat,” shouts Jassim.
Uncle Saoud dismisses Khalid with a wave, but not before shooting Abdulla a considering look.
“You don’t even know any girls,” Abdulla says, giving the boy a light punch in the arm to keep him from feeling bad about being rejected from their small circle. “Get out of here.”
“What about Amal?” Khalid repeats.
“No, no, no.” Abdulla shakes his head. “No one from Al Khor or Wakra who wants to spend all day Friday visiting her family, gossiping with her ten sisters, me in the majlis drinking endless cups of tea listening to someone’s plans for a new satellite dish in their winter desert tent.”
“Haya?” says Khalid again, but this time as a parting shot from a safe distance across the room.
Saoud raises a fist as though intending to come after his youngest child if he doesn’t exit.
“Out. This is for adults.”
The boy disappears.
“Even worse,” Abdulla goes on bitterly. “A pious family where all the women wear niqab and the men travel to Dubai for their fun. Hypocrites.”
“Enough, now you’re like the women,” his father says. He pounds a fist on the chair near Abdulla’s elbow.
Abdulla sits very still.
Love Comes Later Page 2